If you're not a native of the Eastern Shore, you no doubt have a story about how you ended up here with "sand between your toes", as folks around here call making this place home.
My story begins a full year and a half before I ever set foot in Salisbury, when I met a dear gentleman and friend, Ben Kankowsky.
When you get old enough to start looking back on your life, you sense a pattern. Chance meetings with people, upon reflection, become markers on the road you travel. Ben introduced me to the Eastern Shore, long before it became my home.
Our chance meeting occurred in the summer of 1972 while I was working at the Grace Chemical Company in southeast Baltimore. It was a summer job, before heading back to college in the fall.
Ben ran the mail room and it was one of my duties to take all the afternoon mail to him. I'll never forget his face as it popped around to the window and a shy grin met me right in the eye. His eyes, blue and twinkling, had that magic that lets you see the the person's soul. And I knew right away he was a good man. I smiled back and as he proceeded to ask me about myself I realized he knew a few things already. Not much went on around Grace without Ben knowing about it.
Our afternoon chats became a ritual and one of the high points in a summer employee's day. Time to share a Coke, have a smoke and for a moment, escape the grind. I told Ben about myself. I was working on my B.A. in Theater and engaged to be married the following May. I told him of my dream to become an actress.
Ben would tell me about growing up on Baltimore's East Side, a stronghold of Polish Catholics.I soon learned, that although he was proud to be from Baltimore, Ben's dream was to live on the Eastern Shore.. in a place called Crisfield.
On Friday afternoons he would ask, "Should I stop by your house Sunday and drop off some fish or crabs?" Ben lived for the weekends when he would make the run to Crisfield, with his boat, and spend Saturday and Sunday on the Tangier Sound pulling in whatever was biting.
He was a year from retirement, and was anxious to move down full time to his adopted home. Soon, he began to know Crisfield as he knew Grace Chemical, by knowing all of the people, and knowing thier lives. Over the years he had found a welcome in that close-knit harbor town.
When he would come, my father would eye the packed ice chest Ben would lug up to the front steps each Sunday, and I could tell he was itching to see what his fishing skills could yield.
Ben had been talking about taking us fishing for a weekend in Crisfield for some time. Our family decided to take him up on his offer at the end of the season.
Like many, I suppose, I had always regarded The Eastern Shore of Maryland to be an impediment which lay between the Severn River heat and the cool ocean breezes. We had never varied from that course.
But twenty three years ago, Somerset County was even more beautiful in its inherent "shore" way, more timeless, more... remote. I was struck with a feeling of being in another country, in another time.
And the people were different as well. Thick shore dialects ran past my ears and to that place in the brain where language is recognized, and assimilated.
I would find myself thinking.. "What did they just say?"
The transition had some difficulties. My father, ended up exchanging terse words with the man who was renting us a room for the night over a misunderstanding about accomadations. But the exchange included much more, I think. I had the feeling the fellow was simply trying to figure out what kind of people we were.
"These Eastern Shore folks sure are a feisty lot. ", Dad commented afterwards. And they did seem to eye us foreigners with suspicion. But, with Ben at our side we were given the same friendly greeting he received, which was always a warm one.
We had a great time that weekend. And Ben gave me a view of the Eastern Shore that I would draw on in years to come. He opened my eyes and heart to the other side of the Shore, the real country and real people who lived here then, and live here now.
It is hard to imagine, now, that in the early seventies, what we know today as "environmentalism" was not yet a part of the American consciousness.
But, even then we knew places with such wildlife and relatively untouched naturalness were special. In town, because of Ben, we were allowed an insider's view of life in a small town where folks grow up together, work hard and make their living from the water.
There's a special familiarity. People know one another and meet in restaurants to share the day's news. They meet to kid one another and check up on one another and just pass the time of day.
It was wonderful to experience Ben's little corner of the world. But I never imagined myself living on the Shore, or anywhere so removed from what I then defined as "civilization and culture." My lack of imagination brought me up short not soon after.
A year and a half later, my husband and I moved to Salisbury. It was Rob's first job out of college. We were setting up housekeeping. I was in shock as we entered the city, I remember seeing chicken feathers floating over Route 50.
Ben had already been living in Crisfield for a year. He and the beach were the only things I thought at the time Delmarva had going for it.
But, Ben's love affair with the Shore worked on me. It was his idea of heaven on earth. Where else would you be any happier ? And, later, when I started doing T.V. work, he was delighted to watch my success and see his 'transplant' begin to grow, and to take root.
One night, after doing a weather broadcast I received a call from a woman in Crisfield. She told me she knew I was a friend of Ben's, and was sorry to tell me he had died that afternoon of a heart attack at Aunt Em's Restaurant. I was crushed.
I went down to Crisfield the next day. His brothers and sisters came from Baltimore to pack up his belongings, and a group of us gathered at Aunt Em's to honor Ben with stories, laughter and tears.
Crisfield's never been quite the same to me since Ben's passing. But the vision he gave to me of his beloved Eastern Shore those many years earlier enabled me to dig in, and to do what I could where I was. Now, over twenty years later, I realize how making friends with Ben that summer, led me to the place that I now love and call home.
kxrouse@sae.ssu.umd.edu